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Rita Perakis

Former Program Associate - Europe Office

Bio

Rita Perakis was a programme associate working on results-based aid initiatives including Development Impact Bonds and Cash on Delivery Aid. She co-authored the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) Assessment. Before joining CGD, Perakis earned a masters in public administration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she served as a consultant on an agribusiness development project for the Millennium Challenge Corporation and intern working on youth unemployment issues for the Education for Employment Foundation-Morocco. She previously held positions at Seedco, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Carter Center. Perakis holds a BA in international studies from Emory University.

More From Rit Perakis

While global development is about much more than aid, US foreign assistance is, and will remain, one of the most visible tools for US development policy in many countries. The US government spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget — about $23 billion — on nonmilitary foreign assistance across the globe. These programs have consistently come under fire for failing to achieve measurable and sustainable results, ignoring local priorities and contexts, perpetuating bureaucratic inefficiencies and inflexibility, and repeating mistakes over time. A paradigm shift within US aid agencies is needed. In this brief, we outline concrete proposals that would address many of the traditional shortcomings of US foreign aid approaches.

Results-based aid (RBA) is a form of foreign assistance in which one government disburses funds to another for achieving an outcome. This paper distinguishes four different theories used to justify RBA programs and analyzes four case studies – from GAVI, the Amazon Fund, Ethiopian Secondary Education and Salud Mesoamérica.

In recent years, donors have been making greater use of performance-based payment approaches to fund development programs. The UK Department for International Development, using the broader term being used across the UK government, has added “Payment by Results” (PbR) to the development lexicon.

Development agencies are increasingly interested in making aid more transparent, stakeholder-led, and effective by expanding the use of payment by results (PbR) — rewarding those implementing projects on the basis of results delivered instead of paying for inputs. For payment by results to work, you have to get a lot of things right. It has to be for the right kind of programme targeting the right results, properly measured and rewarded in the right way. These issues, and more, are laid out in Stefan Dercon and Paul Clist’s 12 principles for payment by results (PDF).

Development agencies are increasingly interested in making aid more transparent, stakeholder-led, and effective by expanding the use of payment by results (PbR) — rewarding those implementing projects on the basis of results delivered instead of paying for inputs. For payment by results to work, you have to get a lot of things right. It has to be for the right kind of programme targeting the right results, properly measured and rewarded in the right way. These issues, and more, are laid out in Stefan Dercon and Paul Clist’s 12 principles for payment by results (PDF).

In recent years, donors have been making greater use of performance-based payment approaches to fund development programs. The UK Department for International Development, using the broader term being used across the UK government, has added “Payment by Results” (PbR) to the development lexicon.

While global development is about much more than aid, US foreign assistance is, and will remain, one of the most visible tools for US development policy in many countries. The US government spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget — about $23 billion — on nonmilitary foreign assistance across the globe. These programs have consistently come under fire for failing to achieve measurable and sustainable results, ignoring local priorities and contexts, perpetuating bureaucratic inefficiencies and inflexibility, and repeating mistakes over time. A paradigm shift within US aid agencies is needed. In this brief, we outline concrete proposals that would address many of the traditional shortcomings of US foreign aid approaches.

The government of Washington DC recently announced plans to launch its first Social Impact Bond (SIB), an innovative finance approach that in this case will be aimed at reducing teen pregnancy and improving educational outcomes for teenagers.